Saturday, March 7, 2009

My best session of the year – all thanks to Icemonkey.

Always give credit when credit is due.

If you’ve not seen this yet download it here, its absolute gold in my opinion.
So you want to be a winning cash game player

The timing on this article being released was perfect. Prior to starting last night’s session I had set myself a specific goal. Nothing of any monetary value as focusing on that generally brings un-realistic expectations followed by negative results. My goal was to play fewer hands to lower my VPIP.

January all I focused on was making $600, didn’t happen.
February I started to re-build my bankroll heavily assisted by a rocket start on 5NL.
March, so far, had been all bad…….until last night.

To illustrate why I only wanted to focus on lowering my VPIP for the session have a look at the graphs below.

10NL March graph


10NL last night graph


See the pattern?

I think I’ll blame durrrr for this. Since watching HSP season 5 I thought I’d copy his aggression but unfortunately it didn’t work for me. Last night I got my stats down to the following:

My overall March stats have been:
18/10/3

The past session was:
14/9/3


In my humble opinion, I murdered 5NL. Averaged 18.26BB/100 in 6271 hands. Whether that was a hot run, awesome play or complete luck I don’t know but what I do know is that it made me cocky at 10NL. I started opening UTG and from EP with hands like K9s, QTs, J8s etc. Massive mistake. Reading Icemonkey’s article simply reminded me that this is still only 10NL and I’m going to get called down with anything. Stick to the basics and play the big hands strong. This fundamental approach and style of play got me back in the black. My plans are to maintain this exact style until I reach 25NL, then it’s time to reassess.

Thanks Sean
Custo